Gold is the first choice–as a matter of people’s preference. I did not say it was temporally the first thing used as money. That is your straw man. Own it. Read what I wrote and dispute that rather than flailing your misinterpretation. And talk about talking past each other. You didn’t say a word in support of your amazing assertion that gold is a form of debt (or credit), unless your curous reference to semantics and definitions was a subtle acknowledgment that you were wrong.

All fiat currencies are imposed by force, the force of legal-tender laws forcibly removing people’s freedom to chose what it is they will use for contracts and to settle debts, “public and private,” as those dollar fiats put it. The fact that those fiats are only used because people are forced to use them demonstrates beyond argument that gold (and to a lesser extent silver) are the people’s first choice (think preference, not time) in money. Care to prove me wrong? Get rid of those legal-tender laws, as well as any counterfeiting laws designed to protect governments’ fiat-money monopolies, and then we can argue about it.

The rising dollar price of gold ($1795 at the moment) indicates that many people today are using gold as a store of wealth, which is to say, as money. It is being used by more and more smart people who have had it up to their choking point with those ceaselessly depreciating fiat currencies they are forced to accept, which drain away rather than store their hard-earned wealth. That is precisely what people in the real world are actually doing with gold. You should try it. Those who have been using it to store their wealth as it comes in (viz., for money), which they don’t need immediately for transaction requiring legal tender, have, over the past decade or so, found that their gold very effectively served to store their wealth–if it hasn’t also made them a little wealthier. The only reason gold hasn’t replaced fiats in people’s exchange transaction is because they are forced by law to use fiats.

Calguscus, you assert, without a shred of logical support:

“Monetary Analysis is the most general term – Schumpeter usefully divided economics into Monetary Analysis & Real Analysis, basically the division between creditary/state theories and commodity theories. Mises & Menger simply did not understand what the Monetary Analysts were saying, and I am not sure that people here do either.”

Monetary analysis??? Mises invented it! Before his THEORY OF MONEY AND CREDIT, monetary analysis didn’t exist. His dissertation on the subject at a very young age remains the most comprehensive and authoritative monetary analysis yet written. Schumpeter wouldn’t have been able to make his unfortunate division had not Mises introduced him to monetary analysis. But divide it from “real analysis?” Come, come. It can’t be done–if it is to be considered economics rather than tiddliwinks.

The first comprehensive exposition on money remains the best ever written, viz., Mises 1912 classic, THE THEORY OF MONEY AND CREDIT.

This seems to me to be so obviously wrong that I find it hard to believe that anyone would buy it. Gold, the universal first choice of most people among all forms of money, is not a form of credit nor is it a debt. Gold coins are merely gold, a commodity, cast into a convenient size, shape and form. No credit nor debt nor State need be involved. If what you say is the position of “Graeber, MMT, Institutionalist, Keynesian, Creditary, Chartalist, [and] Monetary Analyst, then Mises HUMAN ACTION should be required reading for all of those you mention who would like to improve the quality of their output.

No, it is as I suggested, that someone trained as an empiricist and taught that the empirical way is the only way to discover anything, will find it hard or even impossible to grasp the scientific method of the Austrian-economic science. Such blindness is sometimes described as cognitive dissonance. Of course you wouldn’t be convinced since you have acknowledged that you know nothing about it, and now petulantly declare, so to speak, “And you can’t make me learn anything about it either–so there; take that.”

It is particularly difficult to grasp for anyone who thinks he or she already knows what science is all about, or all there is to know about what science is.

Yes, you have both asserted (something akin to the idea) that “the boundaries of AE are set by human action in all of its manifestations, and that AE’s methodology is a priori.” But as I already suggested the first time, that statement by itself does not mean anything to someone not already familiar with AE (or any theory, for that matter). It is a statement of intent, not of method. Which is why I suggested it would be helpful if you could spend a few choice words explaining that. But rather than doing that, you decide to treat me to a fairly repetitive, rather patronizing reply, apparently in an attempt to make me enthusiastic about AE, which “I might be able to learn if I have an open mind”. Only at that point do you supply something by way of substantive information, but then only in the form of two entire treatises. Is it really that hard to summarize the main points?
Anyway, for various reasons (starting with the fact that your assertion that social sciences methodology can be a priori suggests a certain scientific naivete on your part, and supplemented by what this says), I am not convinced of the methodological soundness of praxeology.

Foppe, both Akiva and I have told you that the boundaries of AE are set by human action in all of its manifestations, and that AE’s methodology is a priori. I wish I could give you a sufficient course on AE in a blog-length comment, because if I could the world would certainly be a more civilized place, but it isn’t that easy. In many respects, AE is simple; but it is not easy. It is particularly difficult to grasp for anyone who thinks he or she already knows what science is all about, or all there is to know about what science is. However, if you have an open mind and would like learn something about AE, its method, and its reach, particularly as it impacts the empirical “evidence” adduced by Professor Graeber, which is the crux of the discussion that has arisen out of Graeber’s interview and Murphy’s criticism thereof, you could discover why you and he both err if you will take the time to read two very small books, both publications available free of charge on line thanks to Mises.org. They are: THE ULTIMATE FOUNDATION OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE, by Ludwig von Mises, approximately 155 pages; (http://mises.org/books/ufofes/default.aspx); and ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND THE AUSTRIAN METHOD, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 88 pages. Professor Graeber would also benefit from reading these two books, for they could save him from errors in his work as an “economic anthropologist.”

To have credit money, people have to account in terms of the credit notes. In other words, the notes need to have a value independent of the debt they record. Assuming that negotiability existed, it is entirely conceivable that these credit claims (or, more realistically, some subset thereof) could have become the money. I find that conclusion unlikely given the evidence I’ve seen, but there’s nothing in economics that rules out the possibility.

Mesopotamia (3500-800 BC)
We have already had occasion to note the predominance of credit money in Mesopotamia, the earliest urban civilization that we know about. In the great temple and palace complexes, not only did money serve largely as an accounting measure rather than physically changing hands, merchants and tradespeople developed credit arrangements of their own. Most of these took the physical form of clay tablets, inscribed with some obligation of future payment, that were then sealed inside clay envelopes and marked with the borrower’s seal. The creditor would keep the envelope as a surety, and it would be broken open on repayment. In some times or places at least, these bullae appear to have become what we would now call negotiable instruments, since the tablet inside did not simply record a promise to pay the original lender, but was designated “to the bearer” — in other words, a tablet recording a debt of five shekels of silver (at prevailing rates of interest) could circulate as the equivalent of a five-shekel promissory note — that is, as money.5
We don’t know how often this happened; how many hands such tablets would typically pass through, how many transactions were based on credit, how often merchants actually did weigh out silver in rough chunks to buy and sell their merchandise, or when they were most likely to do so. No doubt all this varied over time. Promissory notes usually circulated within merchant guilds, or between inhabitants of the relatively well-off urban neighborhoods where people knew one another well enough to trust them to be accountable, but not so well that they could rely on one another for more traditional forms of mutual aid.6 We know even less about the marketplaces frequented by ordinary Mesopotamians, except that tavern-keepers operated on credit, and hawkers and operators of market stalls probably did as well.7

Notes:
5· Pruessner (1928) was perhaps the first to point this out.
6. They appear to have been widely used by Old Assyrian merchants operating in Anatolia (Veenhof 1997).
7· Powell (1978, 1979, 1999:14-18) provides an excellent assessment of the evidence, emphasizing that Babylonians did not produce scales accurate enough to measure the tiny amounts of silver they would have had to use to make ordinary household purchases like fried fish or cords of firewood in cash. He concludes that silver was largely used in transactions between merchants. Market vendors therefore presumably acted as they do in small-scale markets in Africa and Central Asia, today, building up lists of trustworthy clients to whom they could extend credit over time (e.g., Hart 1999:201, Nazpary 2001).